


Lost Time

by nikkiRA



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Sam Wilson is So Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 03:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15134171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nikkiRA/pseuds/nikkiRA
Summary: Bucky hits his head and starts remembering things a little differently.He puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, kisses him quickly, and then heads off. Steve and Sam stand there for approximately two and a half minutes, staring at the place where he disappeared.“Did that just happen or am I having a really good dream?”





	Lost Time

The thing that happens is that Sam and Bucky are sparring and Sam manages to get a good hit in. Steve is sitting in the corner, sketching his friends in front of him, the _skritch_ es of the pencil the only sound other than the laboured breathing and occasional grunts of the men in front of him.

And then – Bucky goes down. And at first Sam grins, because hey, Bucky is a good fighter, to knock him down is pretty goddamn impressive, thank you very much – but then Bucky hits his head on the ground and doesn’t get back up.

Steve is over in a flash, because of course he is. They’re on mats for this exact reason, but if you smack your head hard enough, the mat is only going to do so much. Steve puts worried hands on Bucky’s face, calls his name, and look – Sam is worried, sure, but he’s pretty sure the _goddamn Winter Soldier_ has lived through worse things then a head bump, and Steve Rogers really is the most dramatic asshole in the world.

But Bucky’s eyes flutter open, because it was “Just a bump on the head, Steve, Jesus, I used to be a fucking assassin for Chrissakes,” and then gives Sam an approving nod. “Nice one, Wilson.”

“You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for an excuse to hit you.”

Bucky grins and stands up, shaking off Steve’s outstretched arm with an eye roll. “You’re worse than my mother,” he says, and then, “I’m going to take a shower,” and then –

He puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, kisses him quickly, and then heads off.

Steve and Sam stand there for approximately two and a half minutes, staring at the place where he disappeared.

“Did that just happen or am I having a really good dream?”

“One, I don’t need to hear about those dreams. Two – yeah, it really goddamn did.”

They look at each other. “How hard did he hit his damn head?”

* * *

Steve gets back to his apartment to find Bucky sitting on the counter, glaring at the television in the living room. There was a direct line of sight from the kitchen to the television screen, because apparently everyone was all about something called ‘open concept’ these days, which seemed to translate into having as few walls as possible. Steve walks in carefully.

“You okay Buck?”

“Steve,” he says, sounding actually pretty pissed. Steve gears himself up for – well, something. “How come you didn’t tell me that the Dodgers are in _fucking Los Angeles now?”_

And Steve can’t help but forget about all that went down in the last hour or so, and laughs. Bucky throws his apple core at him. “It’s not funny, you punk, what the fuck is this? How was this not item number one on your ‘things I need to know about the 20th century’ list? How did you make me watch _Star Wars_ before you told me about this?”

Steve is still laughing. “Maybe because I knew you’d do this.”

“This is the worst thing that’s ever fucking happened to me.”

“I have a very thick file that says otherwise.”

“Fucking _L.A.,_ Steve.”

“I know, Buck.” He walks over to where Bucky is still lounging on the counter and studies him closely. “Now, are you sure you’re okay?”

“Christ, yes. Stop being such a fucking worrier.”

“Maybe we should get you checked out for a concussion.”

Bucky shakes his head, then swings his legs out so they trap Steve between them, drawing him in close. “I’m gonna give you a concussion very soon, pal.” Steve doesn’t answer, because his brain is too busy short circuiting due to how close they’re pressed together, and Bucky’s legs linked at the ankles behind his back, and holy shit, he needed to say something, _now._

But then Bucky leans in and kisses him again, deeper then the one they had shared at the gym, and Steve – look, he’s weak, all right? He’ll admit it, again and again he’ll admit it, and it’s wrong and unethical because clearly Bucky knocked something loose, but it’s been seventy years, all right? It’s been seventy years and he’s weak and he kisses back.

It’s strange, to have your first kiss with someone when that someone doesn’t think it’s the first kiss. Because all Steve wants to do is kiss him, and run his hands through Bucky’s hair, and make the moment last as long as possible, but all Bucky wants to do is yell at the television screen.

“Why did this happen?”

Steve sighs. “Something about land? They wanted to build a new stadium but the owner and some New York construction guy went head to head and couldn’t agree and then some people from L.A. wanted to bring a team over there, and the owner of the Dodgers made a deal with them and moved out west.” Yeah, he had read the Wikipedia page about this a few times. He had been just as upset as Bucky when he found out.

Bucky let his head fall forward onto Steve’s shoulder, and Steve’s traitor hands moved around to rub soothingly at Bucky’s back before he could think better of it.

“Los Angeles.”

“Mhm.”

Bucky turned his head and started to mouth at Steve’s neck, which caused goosebumps to erupt all over Steve’s body and was a _direct_ line down to his dick. Bucky and he were close enough that he felt it, and he bit down lightly on the spot where he had been kissing. Steve moaned, low in his throat.

“Want to take my mind off of this horrific betrayal of baseball’s best team?”

“You’re a little biased –” but Bucky cut him off with a kiss, his hands moving quickly down to Steve’s ass.

With great difficulty and extreme display of will power that he hadn’t thought himself capable of, he pulls away. Bucky makes an annoyed noise. “Sorry,” Steve says. Bucky has no goddamn idea how sorry Steve was. “But I – I said I’d meet Sam. I just wanted to come up and see if you were all right.”

“You just _saw_ Sam,” Bucky said, which was a really valid point and Steve’s dick, for one, agreed wholeheartedly, he _had_ just seen Sam. Except he wasn’t really meeting Sam, it’s just that he wasn’t really prepared to have sex for the first time with the guy he’s been in love with for decades. Even if Bucky apparently thought they had, they _hadn’t,_ and Steve wasn’t – the kisses were bad enough, but there’s no way he was going to do that, there was some issue of consent there that he couldn’t properly put his finger on, but also, and this played a bigger role than he cared to admit, he was probably going to be really bad.

“I really do have to go,” he says, because if he doesn’t now then he’s never going to be able to pull himself away.

“Fine,” Bucky says grumpily. “I’ll just stay here and be angry about the Dodgers.”

“You think that’s bad? You should see what they’ve done to bananas.”

“What?” Bucky says sharply, as Steve steps away. “What the fuck did they do to bananas?”

Steve just laughs.

* * *

“You didn’t tell him?” Sam’s voice is incredulous.

“I know!” Steve says. “I know, I know, it’s bad, but I – God.” He put his head in his hands. “I’ve wanted this since I was sixteen,” he says, muffled.

“Then use your goddamn words,” Sam says, sounding not at all sympathetic. “Look, it’s not 1940 anymore,” and this time there’s a bit more understanding in his voice. “You can love whoever you want.”

“It’s not that,” he says firmly. “I have never been ashamed of loving Bucky.”

“Okay. Then what’s going on?”

He sighs. “You got to understand what he was like. Bucky took a different dame out dancing every weekend. He was the most charismatic son of a bitch you’d ever met. I could be doing the chicken dance naked and no one’d even notice, if I was next to him.”

“Must have been pretty annoying.”

He smiles ruefully. “Might have been, except I was one of the poor saps looking at him.”

“So none of the girls stuck around? None of them stayed for the long haul?”

Steve shrugs. “Bucky never wanted to settle down. He said he wouldn’t have time to pull my dumbass out of fights.”

“Dumbass is right,” Sam mutters. “So you’re telling me that he could have had any girl he wanted, but he didn’t want to leave _you.”_

Steve blanched. “It wasn’t – when you say it like that –”

“Like what? Like the truth?”

“Bucky was just… protective –”

“Steve. I’m protective of you. But you can bet your ass I wouldn’t stay perpetually single just to pull you out of fights.”

“You’re protective of me?”

“Focus. This is where we’re at. You’re in love with Barnes. Barnes is in love with you. You’re both fucking idiots. Have I missed anything? That was a rhetorical question,” he says, when Steve opens his mouth. “Good. That still doesn’t explain why you haven’t told him that you’re not together yet.”

“Because I know he’ll be embarrassed! And, and upset. And he might go off the grid again and disappear and go to – to Bucharest, or something –”

“Why the hell would he go to Bucharest?”

“And fine, fine, maybe I’m afraid that I’ll tell him we’re not together and he’ll be relieved because he never really wanted to be.”

Sam rubs a hand over his face. “Look, Steve. Is he gonna be mad? Yeah. Is he gonna freak out? Yeah. Is he gonna disappear for a bit? Probably.”

“Is this supposed to be making me feel better?”

“What I mean is, yeah, he’s gonna be pissed. But he’s going to be even more pissed if he finds out you’ve kept this from him.”

Steve deflates. “I know.”

“It’s not just the lying, Steve. It’s that it’s _you_ lying to him.”

“I know, I know.”

“All right, good. Now get the fuck out of my house.”

Steve did so, dragging his feet the whole way.

* * *

When he got home, there was a pile of bananas in the sink with multiple bullet holes in them. Bucky really was so goddamn dramatic.

“Bucky?” He calls, but it’s late and he’s not surprised that there’s no answer. He shucks off his jacket and heads into his bedroom, stopping dead when he sees the figure in his bed.

Bucky sleeping in his room isn’t new – Bucky had been back for a few months, and the nightmares were still pretty bad, and anyway, the two of them had been sleeping in the same room, the same _bed,_ for ages, and it had never been weird. So he might start off in his own room, but more often than not he found his way into Steve’s bed – or, on occasional nights, sometimes Steve even went to him. So it’s not weird or strange to walk into his room to find Bucky spread out and hogging the blankets like he’d been doing since 1929.

But it’s – well, it’s different now, isn’t it, because Bucky thinks that they’re… well, and he knows he should absolutely not cross this line, that he should leave and sleep on the couch or, more likely, head back to Sam’s and crash there.

Instead he strips off his shirt, tugs on a pair of sweatpants, and crawls into bed beside Bucky.

“I take it you’re not a fan of the new bananas?” He says. Bucky wraps an arm around his waist.

“They’re fucking horrible.”

“They’re not that bad. You get used to them.”

“I’d rather die.”

“Stop being so dramatic.”

“Says the one who crashed a plane in the ocean.”

“You didn’t have to _shoot_ them.”

“I have a long history of shooting things I don’t like.”

Steve laughs and Bucky moves closer. A voice in the back of his head that sounds like Sam is calling him a bunch of names, but he doesn’t notice, only notices how close Bucky is to him. “What the hell happened?”

“There was some kind of… banana plague.”

“Banana plague.”

“Yes, okay, there was, and we lost most of the bananas –”

“War is hell, you know.”

Steve pinches him. “So I guess they made new bananas that couldn’t get the plague and now they taste different.”

“Hmm. Is that why everyone says they’re anti-vaccination, now?”

Steve laughs quietly. “No, that’s just a whole other brand of stupidity.”

Bucky presses his nose into Steve’s neck. “I can’t believe they ruined bananas and baseball.” Steve is rubbing circles on Bucky’s back, because Steve is an idiot and he’s in love and he’s an idiot in love and everything is going to be ruined when he finally tells Bucky, so screw it, he’s going to enjoy this for now.

Tomorrow. He’ll tell him tomorrow.

* * *

He wakes up to Bucky spread out across his chest. It’s the nicest thing he’s woken up to in a while.

“Stevie,” he mutters, when Steve starts running a hand through his hair. “I had the most horrible dream. It was the twenty-first century, and they ruined the Dodgers, and they fucked up bananas.”

“I have some horrible news for you, Buck.”

Bucky buries his head into the crook of Steve’s neck. “Say it ain’t so.”

Steve chuckles, which devolves into something a lot more breathless and throaty when he feels lips on his neck. He remembers telling himself that today was the day he was going to tell Bucky, but all he can focus on is how nice this is, and how warm he feels, and how much he doesn’t want to ruin everything. He’s being selfish, he knows, because this isn’t fair, not to him or to Bucky. But –

Bucky leans up and kisses him, and Steve kisses back, and he hates how weak he is, how selfish, and Bucky will have every reason to hate him when he finds out.

“I have to go for my run.”

Bucky makes an irritated noise. “You really don’t.”

“Buck –”

Bucky bit his bottom lip. Steve lets out a frankly embarrassed sound. “Fine, you goddamn ass. Go for your stupid run.” He flops to the side. Steve lets his eyes rake over Bucky’s naked torso before he forces himself out of bed.

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do.

“I’ll be back,” he says, before he can stop himself. Bucky grins up at him.

“I’ll be here,” he says. Steve dregs up every ounce of willpower he has and turns away.

* * *

“Barnes has been texting me all morning about bananas, which I assume means you didn’t tell him,” is what Sam says to him the minute he sees him. “Unless bananas is code for something freaky, and he was shooting at you all night.”

Steve rubs the back of his neck. “I – well, I was planning on it. Honestly.”

Sam lets out a beleaguered sigh. “What exactly is your endgame here, Steve? Are you just going to go along with this for the rest of your life? Pretend that you’re together? Go along with this game until one of you dies? What happens if he asks if you remember something that never happened? If someone asks when you two got together and you don’t have the same answer? What _exactly_ is your plan?”

“I know, I know. I don’t _have_ a plan. I know I have to tell him.”

Sam points at him. “New plan. If you don’t tell him tonight, _I’m_ telling him. You know I’m not exactly Barnes’ biggest fan, but he doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve being lied to again. Not by his friends.”

Steve sighs. “You’re great at guilt trips, do you know that?”

“And you’re great at not listening.”

“Guilty as charged.”

Sam shakes his head. “You’re a goddamn pain in the ass, you know that?”

Steve slings an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Guilty as charged,” he says with a laugh.

* * *

When he gets back to his place, Bucky is out. He can’t help but feel slightly relieved. No matter what he told Sam – no matter how much he knows he has to – he isn’t eager to bring up the conversation.

Instead he starts to make dinner. Bucky had been kind enough to clean up the bullet ridden bananas from the sink, although there was still one banana left on the counter, as if Bucky had wanted it to watch the others die and suffer. As if he was sending a message.

Steve starts in on dinner. Truthfully, since he had come back Bucky was more of the cook. He said it calmed him down, but Steve was pretty sure he could find his way around a cookbook, and God knows Bucky had enough cookbooks. He grabs one down from the shelf and starts flipping through it, landing on a recipe for a fancy chicken dish that he thinks Bucky would probably like.

Thirty-five minutes later Bucky comes home to find the kitchen an absolute disaster.

“What the fuck did you do?”

Steve gestures at the cookbook wordlessly. Bucky takes a look at the recipe he had attempted and then rolls his eyes. “I can’t seem to find the step where it says you have to wear the breading before you roll the chicken in it.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “You know I’ve never been much of a cook.”

Bucky reaches up, swiping at Steve’s face and coming away with flour at his thumb. He licks it off. Steve swallows audibly.

“How about we order takeout?”

Steve finds himself nodding. “What do you want?”

Bucky grins. “I have an idea.” He moves forward, then, pushing Steve back against the counter and kissing him soundly. Steve winds a hand through Bucky’s hair and pushes back for one second, two seconds, three seconds, before Bucky starts to pull at Steve’s belt, and guilt causes him to pull away.

“Bucky, hang on, wait –”

Bucky moves his attack to Steve’s neck, instead, sucking marks into his skin. It’s very hard to concentrate.

“Would you listen to me for one goddamn minute –”

Bucky sighs and pulls his lips away, although he doesn’t move back at all. “What could possibly be so important?”

Steve takes a breath and steels his nerves. “Okay, first I want you to know that I – I love you, and I’ve loved you for ages, and you’re the most important person to me –”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “This sounds like a breakup. You breaking up with me, Rogers?”

“No,” he says seriously. “I’m not. Because we’re not _together,_ Buck. Whatever you may think… we’re not together. When you hit your head the other day… I don’t know what happened, if it knocked something loose, or messed with your memories or something, but we’re not together, Bucky. We never have been.”

He waits. Waits for Bucky to freak out, or run off, or freeze up. Waits for him to yell, to yank himself away. What ends up happening is that Bucky groans and drops his head onto Steve’s shoulder.

“Jesus Christ, Steve. I fucking know that.”

“You – what?”

Bucky moves away and starts cleaning up the mess Steve had made. “You don’t just hit your head and then remember one aspect of your whole life differently. That’s not how the human body works, genius. If I had had a concussion, I would have forgotten a bunch of things.”

“I just… figured you had forgotten we weren’t together?”

“Oh, Steve. You adorable idiot.”

“I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

Bucky sighs. “I should have known your fucking guilty conscience would get in the way.”

“Okay, can you _start over?”_

Bucky let his head drop. “Look, Steve. This thing between us has been going on since probably 1935, or something, but we – we never did anything about it. And before it was because it could have gotten us killed, and then there was a war, and then, well, you know. And now it’s like there’s so much shit between us that neither of us can cross over it, even if we wanted to. And so, when I was fighting with Sam, and he managed to knock me down, I thought – well, my head is so fucked up that I figured I could get away with this. That I could cross that distance between us by just pretending that it wasn’t there.”

Steve’s heart is beating so wildly it reminds him of the pre-serum days. “Buck, what’re you saying?”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Fuck, you’re a pain in my ass, Steve. Did you want to fuck me before the war?”

Steve blanches. “I – what?”

“Don’t be such a prude, Stevie, it’s just a question.”

There’s no point denying it, obviously. “Yeah.”

“And do you want to fuck me now, still?”

He can feel himself blushing. “Yeah.”

“Right. So why haven’t you?”

“I – I didn’t think you’d want to. I didn’t want to push you. Didn’t want to risk losing you.”

Bucky looks borderline angry. “Yeah, well, you’re a fucking idiot, what else is new. And I didn’t do anything because… well, I guess I don’t really know how. So I was waiting on you, and you weren’t gonna do anything, so we were just gonna keep doing this until someone finally took us out.”

Steve is starting to understand. “So you decided to just… pretend.”

Bucky shrugs. “I didn’t know how to do it properly, but I could do it like this. It was easy to pretend that we’d been doing this for years.”

Steve takes a step forward, reaches out a tentative hand and runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “So how did you know that I wanted you?”

Bucky finally smiles. It causes something warm to burst open in Steve’s chest. “You ain’t subtle, Rogers. Never have been.”

Steve carefully pushes Bucky against the counter, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s waist and pulling them together. “I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

“I think we can both probably take the blame on this one.”

Steve kisses him, then. It’s not technically their first kiss, but it’s their first kiss with them both on the same page, and by the end of it they’re both panting and hard.

“Guess we have some time to make up for, huh?” Steve asks breathlessly. Bucky pulls him against him again.

* * *

Later that night he gets a text from Sam: _did you tell him??_

Steve sends him back a picture of Bucky’s naked torso and the bite marks blossoming all over. He’s making a heart with his hands in the picture. Steve writes: _I told him._

Sam sends back a text almost immediately: _You two are the goddamn worst don’t ever text me again._

Bucky sends him a line of kissing emoji’s, and then climbs on top of Steve again.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @aravenlikeawritingdesk


End file.
